Tuesday, November 14, 2017

The letter dates to June 9, 1969… to the time when Yale Law
School first decided to enact diversity quotas. Written by California appellate
judge Macklin Fleming to Yale Law Dean Louis Pollak, it counts as eerily
prescient. John Hinderaker calls Fleming a prophet.

Here are some of the salient points. You decide whether
Fleming showed foresight. And if the outcome of the experiment was foreseeable,
why have so many schools signed on.

Anyway, Fleming wrote:

From
your remarks and those of Dean Poor, I understand that 43 black students have
been admitted to next fall’s class, of whom 5 qualified under the regular
standards and 38 did not. … You also said that the future policy of the Law
School will be to admit 10 per cent of each entering class without regard to
qualification under regular standards.

He continued, that Yale had now established two separate law schools:

With
the adoption of its new admission policy the Law School has taken a long step
toward the practice of apartheid and the maintenance of two law schools under
one roof. Already there has been established in the Law School building a Black
Law Students Union lounge with furniture and law books provided by the school.
And I learned from Dean Poor that the 12 black students in the present first
year class who were admitted under relaxed standards have not done well
academically. Dean Poor attributed this deficiency to the pre-occupation of
these students with racial activities. I think it equally logical to attribute
their preoccupation with racial activities to their lack of qualification to
compete on even terms in the study of law.

Since black students admitted to fulfill a diversity quota
were more likely to be at the bottom of their class, they would start feeling
intellectually inferior:

If in a
given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the
class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of
intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of
intellectual inferiority among the black students.

Next, Fleming explained what might happen when a group of
students was consigned an inferior status:

No one
can be expected to accept an inferior status willingly. The black students,
unable to compete on even terms in the study of law, inevitably will seek other
means to achieve recognition and self-expression. This is likely to take two
forms. First, agitation to change the environment from one in which they are
unable to compete to one in which they can. Demands will be made for
elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of
courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition
for academic credit of sociological activities which have only an indirect
relationship to legal training.

Given that America’s universities have adopted the same
policies, we should perhaps not be surprised that they have tried to downplay
competition and practice rampant grade inflation.

And, of course, the students who cannot compete in the classroom
will take their struggle outside of the classroom, to protest on the street.

Fleming explained:

Second,
it seems probable that this group will seek personal satisfaction and public
recognition by aggressive conduct, which, although ostensibly directed at
external injustices and problems, will in fact be primarily motivated by the
psychological needs of the members of the group to overcome feelings of
inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies. Since the common
denominator of the group of students with lower qualifications is one of race
this aggressive expression will undoubtedly take the form of racial demands–the
employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the
establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in
black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to
satisfy minimum academic standards.

And, of course, a diversity program that favors some groups
will necessarily disfavor applicants from other groups. At the time Fleming wrote Ivy League
schools were working to overcome their discriminatory policies against Jewish
students. A quota system that admitted unqualified black applicants would
necessarily exclude more qualified Jewish applicants:

A quota
policy particularly discriminates against minority groups which have achieved
disproportionate representation in a particular field. Such a policy
discriminated severely against Jewish applicants for admission to medical
schools in the 1930’s. That policy was undoubtedly justified by its supporters
as one designed to preserve a proportion of gentile students in medical schools
equivalent to their proportion in the general population. Currently, the
orientals in California, roughly 1 per cent of the population, comprise in some
instances 30 per cent of the enrollment in certain engineering and technical
schools. Were a quota system to be introduced in those schools in order to
favor black and Mexican-American applicants, the first losers would be
applicants from the presently disproportionately represented oriental group.

Amazingly the more the diversity policy fails the more America's universities adopt it and continue to try to adapt to it.

2 comments:

An interesting exercise for the reader: review the Association of American Medical Colleges data sheets (avail. online) of the MCAT scores, GPAs, and medical school acceptance rates of blacks, as compared to Caucasians and Asians.